What's the best backup drive?

To protect your important data, you definitely need to take backups because sooner or later you will face a hard drive failure because every drive has its own expiration date. There are so many hard drives on the market that sometimes you can get lost in the selection. In this article, we will provide you with key points to think about before choosing a particular backup drive.

  • Warranty service period - The more years of warranty service the manufacturer provides, the better. Of course, having a warranty does not guarantee that the drives will not fail, but if the manufacturer gives, say, a 5-year warranty, then the manufacturer is quite confident in the reliability, because otherwise it would not be economically feasible. For example, WD Black drives have a 5-year warranty, G-Drive drives have a 3-year warranty.
  • User reviews - on various forums where storage devices are discussed you can find too many mentions of problems with Lacie drives and Seagate Barracuda drives. Therefore, we do not recommend choosing these hard disks.
  • Don't trust refurbished disks - by purchasing a refurbished drive, you save money, but you will most likely regret this choice during use.
  • Integrated SATA bridge - do not buy external hard drives with a built-in SATA adapter. If this part breaks, you will be in big trouble. The disk itself may be physically healthy, but you will not have access to the data. You cannot fix this yourself. Typically, external hard drives from WD suffer from this problem. Seagate drives may not be any better, but at least they can be taken out of the box and connected via a SATA cable or adapter.
  • Cloud storage - in 2023, this is perhaps the best option. If everything is configured correctly and the storage provider ensures that there are multiple copies of the data, then it is very reliable. However, this type of backup is not suitable for people with privacy principles because your personal data may become non-private.
  • A redundant disk array is always better than a single disk - if possible, then select a RAID5 or RAID1 array for backup. This will require an additional disk, but you get a high degree of reliability. If you are not familiar with RAID arrays, please visit this site for the detailed information - RAID calculator.

Still have questions?